_Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright.
And I would rather say, _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man;
no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is
no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity.
Neither "the human" nor "humanity," neither the simple adjective nor the
substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The man of
flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who
dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and
wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
For there is another thing which is also called man, and he is the
subject of not a few lucubrations, more or less scientific. He is the
legendary featherless biped, the _zôon politikhon_ of Aristotle,
the social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the
Manchester school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the
vertical mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age
nor of another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief,
merely an idea. That is to say, a no-man.
The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone--I, you, reader
of mine, the other man yonder, all of us who walk solidly on the earth.
And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
self-styled philosophers like it or not.
In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems
are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously, and
their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inner
biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
secondary place. And yet it is precisely this inner biography that
explains for us most things.
It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry
than to science. All philosophic systems which have been constructed as
a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have
in every age possessed much less consistency and life than those which
expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.
And, though they concern us so greatly, and are, indeed, indispensable
for our life and thought, the sciences are in a certain sense more
foreign to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective end--that is
to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a
matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the kind called
theoretical, is, like a mechanical discovery--that of the steam-engine,
the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing which is useful
for something else. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in enabling
us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But she,
wherefore is she useful to us? A man takes an electric tram to go to
hear an opera, and asks himself, Which, in this case, is the more
useful, the tram or the opera?
Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary
conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception,
a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward
action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a
consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our
philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the
world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And life,
like everything affective, has roots in subconsciousness, perhaps in
unconsciousness.
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it
is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps
pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.
Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been
defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which
differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason.
More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps
or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves
equations of the second degree.
And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.
Take Kant, the man Immanuel Kant, who was born and lived at Königsberg,
in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth. In the philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and
head--that is to say, a man--there is a significant somersault, as
Kierkegaard, another man--and what a man!--would have said, the
somersault from the _Critique of Pure Reason_ to the _Critique of
Practical Reason_. He reconstructs in the latter what he destroyed in
the former, in spite of what those may say who do not see the man
himself. After having examined and pulverized with his analysis the
traditional proofs of the existence of God, of the Aristotelian God, who
is the God corresponding to the _zôon politikon_, the abstract
God, the unmoved prime Mover, he reconstructs God anew; but the God of
the conscience, the Author of the moral order--the Lutheran God, in
short. This transition of Kant exists already in embryo in the Lutheran
notion of faith.
The first God, the rational God, is the projection to the outward
infinite of man as he is by definition--that is to say, of the abstract
man, of the man no-man; the other God, the God of feeling and volition,
is the projection to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of the
concrete man, the man of flesh and bone.
Kant reconstructed with the heart that which with the head he had
overthrown. And we know, from the testimony of those who knew him and
from his testimony in his letters and private declarations, that the man
Kant, the more or less selfish old bachelor who professed philosophy at
Königsberg at the end of the century of the Encyclopedia and the goddess
of Reason, was a man much preoccupied with the problem--I mean with the
only real vital problem, the problem that strikes at the very root of
our being, the problem of our individual and personal destiny, of the
immortality of the soul. The man Kant was not resigned to die utterly.
And because he was not resigned to die utterly he made that leap, that
immortal somersault,[5] from the one Critique to the other.
Whosoever reads the _Critique of Practical Reason_ carefully and without
blinkers will see that, in strict fact, the existence of God is therein
deduced from the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the
soul from the existence of God. The categorical imperative leads us to a
moral postulate which necessitates in its turn, in the teleological or
rather eschatological order, the immortality of the soul, and in order
to sustain this immortality God is introduced. All the rest is the
jugglery of the professional of philosophy.
The man Kant felt that morality was the basis of eschatology, but the
professor of philosophy inverted the terms.
Another professor, the professor and man William James, has somewhere
said that for the generality of men God is the provider of immortality.
Yes, for the generality of men, including the man Kant, the man James,
and the man who writes these lines which you, reader, are reading.
Talking to a peasant one day, I proposed to him the hypothesis that
there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a
Consciousness[6] of the Universe, but that for all that the soul of
every man may not be immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. He
replied: "Then wherefore God?" So answered, in the secret tribunal of
their consciousness, the man Kant and the man James. Only in their
capacity as professors they were compelled to justify rationally an
attitude in itself so little rational. Which does not mean, of course,
that the attitude is absurd.
Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the
real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel,
continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that
reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of
definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe,
like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a
hole and enclosing it with steel.
Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who lived at the
beginning of the eighteenth century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to
be the greatest man in the Anglican Church, wrote, at the conclusion of
the first chapter of his great work, _The Analogy of Religion_, the
chapter which treats of a future life, these pregnant words: "This
credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how
little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the
purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would.
Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be
a proof of religion. For, that we are to live hereafter, is just as
reconcilable with the scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for
by it, as that we are now alive is: and therefore nothing can be more
absurd than to argue from that scheme that there can be no future
state."
The man Butler, whose works were perhaps known to the man Kant, wished
to save the belief in the immortality of the soul, and with this object
he made it independent of belief in God. The first chapter of his
_Analogy_ treats, as I have said, of the future life, and the second of
the government of God by rewards and punishments. And the fact is that,
fundamentally, the good Anglican bishop deduces the existence of God
from the immortality of the soul. And as this deduction was the good
Anglican bishop's starting-point, he had not to make that somersault
which at the close of the same century the good Lutheran philosopher had
to make. Butler, the bishop, was one man and Kant, the professor,
another man.
To be a man is to be something concrete, unitary, and substantive; it is
to be a thing--_res_. Now we know what another man, the man Benedict
Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew who was born and lived in Holland in the
middle of the seventeenth century, wrote about the nature of things. The
sixth proposition of Part III. of his _Ethic_ states: _unaquoeque res,
quatenus in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur_--that is,
Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its
own being. Everything in so far as it is in itself--that is to say, in
so far as it is substance, for according to him substance is _id quod in
se est et per se concipitur_--that which is in itself and is conceived
by itself. And in the following proposition, the seventh, of the same
part, he adds: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare
conatur, nihil est proeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam_--that is, the
endeavour wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is
nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. This means that your
essence, reader, mine, that of the man Spinoza, that of the man Butler,
of the man Kant, and of every man who is a man, is nothing but the
endeavour, the effort, which he makes to continue to be a man, not to
die. And the other proposition which follows these two, the eighth,
says: _conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur,
nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit_--that is, The endeavour
whereby each individual thing endeavours to persist involves no finite
time but indefinite time. That is to say that you, I, and Spinoza wish
never to die and that this longing of ours never to die is our actual
essence. Nevertheless, this poor Portuguese Jew, exiled in the mists of
Holland, could never attain to believing in his own personal
immortality, and all his philosophy was but a consolation which he
contrived for his lack of faith. Just as other men have a pain in hand
or foot, heart-ache or head-ache, so he had God-ache. Unhappy man! And
unhappy fellow-men!
And man, this thing, is he a thing? How absurd soever the question may
appear, there are some who have propounded it. Not long ago there went
abroad a certain doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and
much ill. And among other ills that it wrought was the introduction of a
method of analysis whereby facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of
facts. Most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only
fragments of facts. In psychology its action was harmful. There were
even scholastics meddling in literature--I will not say philosophers
meddling in poetry, because poet and philosopher are twin brothers, if
not even one and the same--who carried this Positivist psychological
analysis into the novel and the drama, where the main business is to
give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and bone, and by dint
of studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself disappeared.
The same thing happened to them which is said often to happen in the
examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical
compounds, when the reagents destroy the very body which it was proposed
to examine and all that is obtained is the products of its
decomposition.
Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory
states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in
envisaging consciousness itself, the "I." To ask a man about his "I" is
like asking him about his body. And note that in speaking of the "I," I
speak of the concrete and personal "I," not of the "I" of Fichte, but of
Fichte himself, the man Fichte.
That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not
another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of
unity and a principle of continuity. A principle of unity firstly in
space, thanks to the body, and next in action and intention. When we
walk, one foot does not go forward and the other backward, nor, when we
look, if we are normal, does one eye look towards the north and the
other towards the south. In each moment of our life we entertain some
purpose, and to this purpose the synergy of our actions is directed.
Notwithstanding the next moment we may change our purpose. And in a
certain sense a man is so much the more a man the more unitary his
action. Some there are who throughout their whole life follow but one
single purpose, be it what it may.
Also a principle of continuity in time. Without entering upon a
discussion--an unprofitable discussion--as to whether I am or am not he
who I was twenty years ago, it appears to me to be indisputable that he
who I am to-day derives, by a continuous series of states of
consciousness, from him who was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is
the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of
the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by
memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our
memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past
to transform itself into our future.
All this, I know well, is sheer platitude; but in going about in the
world one meets men who seem to have no feeling of their own
personality. One of my best friends with whom I have walked and talked
every day for many years, whenever I spoke to him of this sense of one's
own personality, used to say: "But I have no sense of myself; I don't
know what that is."
On a certain occasion this friend remarked to me: "I should like to be
So-and-so" (naming someone), and I said: "That is what I shall never be
able to understand--that one should want to be someone else. (To want to
be someone else is to want to cease to be he who one is.) I understand
that one should wish to have what someone else has, his wealth or his
knowledge; but to be someone else, that is a thing I cannot comprehend."
It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes
prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be
someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their
normality in their misfortune--that is to say, when they endeavour to
persist in their own being--prefer misfortune to non-existence. For
myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a child, I remained
unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then
nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a
furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as
one of our ascetics has put it.[7]
To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should
become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be
himself. Everyone defends his own personality, and only consents to a
change in his mode of thinking or of feeling in so far as this change is
able to enter into the unity of his spirit and become involved in its
continuity; in so far as this change can harmonize and integrate itself
with all the rest of his mode of being, thinking and feeling, and can at
the same time knit itself with his memories. Neither of a man nor of a
people--which is, in a certain sense, also a man--can a change be
demanded which breaks the unity and continuity of the person. A man can
change greatly, almost completely even, but the change must take place
within his continuity.
It is true that in certain individuals there occur what are called
changes of personality; but these are pathological cases, and as such
are studied by alienists. In these changes of personality, memory, the
basis of consciousness, is completely destroyed, and all that is left to
the sufferer as the substratum of his individual continuity, which has
now ceased to be personal, is the physical organism. For the subject who
suffers it, such an infirmity is equivalent to death--it is not
equivalent to death only for those who expect to inherit his fortune, if
he possesses one! And this infirmity is nothing less than a revolution,
a veritable revolution.
A disease is, in a certain sense, an organic dissociation; it is a
rebellion of some element or organ of the living body which breaks the
vital synergy and seeks an end distinct from that which the other
elements co-ordinated with it seek. Its end, considered in itself--that
is to say, in the abstract--may be more elevated, more noble, more
anything you like; but it is different. To fly and breathe in the air
may be better than to swim and breathe in the water; but if the fins of
a fish aimed at converting themselves into wings, the fish, as a fish,
would perish. And it is useless to say that it would end by becoming a
bird, if in this becoming there was not a process of continuity. I do
not precisely know, but perhaps it may be possible for a fish to
engender a bird, or another fish more akin to a bird than itself; but a
fish, this fish, cannot itself and during its own lifetime become a
bird.
Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my
life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every
individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and
continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as
a part of that people. What if some other people is better than our own?
Very possibly, although perhaps we do not clearly understand what is
meant by better or worse. Richer? Granted. More cultured? Granted
likewise. Happier? Well, happiness ... but still, let it pass! A
conquering people (or what is called conquering) while we are conquered?
Well and good. All this is good--but it is something different. And that
is enough. Because for me the becoming other than I am, the breaking of
the unity and continuity of my life, is to cease to be he who I am--that
is to say, it is simply to cease to be. And that--no! Anything rather
than that!
Another, you say, might play the part that I play as well or better?
Another might fulfil my function in society? Yes, but it would not be I.
"I, I, I, always I!" some reader will exclaim; "and who are you?" I
might reply in the words of Obermann, that tremendous man Obermann: "For
the universe, nothing--for myself, everything"; but no, I would rather
remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant--to wit, that we ought to think
of our fellow-men not as means but as ends. For the question does not
touch me alone, it touches you also, grumbling reader, it touches each
and all. Singular judgments have the value of universal judgments, the
logicians say. The singular is not particular, it is universal.
Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to
each man, to each I. What is that idol, call it Humanity or call it what
you like, to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed?
For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for
my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs,
and theirs again for those that come after them, and so on in a
never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this
sacrifice?
Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication
without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live.
What is this right to live? They tell me I am here to realize I know not
what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here
to realize myself, to live.
Yes, yes, I see it all!--an enormous social activity, a mighty
civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of
morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial
marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums, and libraries, we
shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist--for
whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
"Why!" the reader will exclaim again, "we are coming back to what the
Catechism says: '_Q_. For whom did God create the world? _A_. For man.'"
Well, why not?--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it
took account of these matters and were a person, would reply "For the
ant," and it would reply rightly. The world is made for consciousness,
for each consciousness.
A human soul is worth all the universe, someone--I know not whom--has
said and said magnificently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life.
Not this life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the
soul--that is to say in his conscious immortality, personal and
concrete--the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory
life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate,
sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to
die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. "Whosoever
will save his life shall lose it," says the Gospel; but it does not say
"whosoever will save his soul," the immortal soul--or, at any rate,
which we believe and wish to be immortal.
And what all the objectivists do not see, or rather do not wish to see,
is that when a man affirms his "I," his personal consciousness, he
affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--the
humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he
affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have
consciousness is that of man.
The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of
finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is
born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are
fundamentally the same thing.
If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it
lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above
all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them light
and enjoy itself in giving them light and so live. And it would think
well.
And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving
for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap of
which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If
consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a
flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing
more execrable than existence.
Some may espy a fundamental contradiction in everything that I am
saying, now expressing a longing for unending life, now affirming that
this earthly life does not possess the value that is given to it.
Contradiction? To be sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes
and of my head that says No! Of course there is contradiction. Who does
not recollect those words of the Gospel, "Lord, I believe, help thou my
unbelief"? Contradiction! Of course! Since we only live in and by
contradictions, since life is tragedy and the tragedy is perpetual
struggle, without victory or the hope of victory, life is contradiction.
The values we are discussing are, as you see, values of the heart, and
against values of the heart reasons do not avail. For reasons are only
reasons--that is to say, they are not even truths. There is a class of
pedantic label-mongers, pedants by nature and by grace, who remind me of
that man who, purposing to console a father whose son has suddenly died
in the flower of his years, says to him, "Patience, my friend, we all
must die!" Would you think it strange if this father were offended at
such an impertinence? For it is an impertinence. There are times when
even an axiom can become an impertinence. How many times may it not be
said--
_Para pensar cual tú, sólo es preciso
no tener nada mas que inteligencia_.[8]
There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain, or
with whatever may be the specific thinking organ; while others think
with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of
the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the
life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into
definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you
know what a professional is? You know what a product of the
differentiation of labour is?
Take a professional boxer. He has learnt to hit with such economy of
effort that, while concentrating all his strength in the blow, he only
brings into play just those muscles that are required for the immediate
and definite object of his action--to knock out his opponent. A blow
given by a non-professional will not have so much immediate, objective
efficiency; but it will more greatly vitalize the striker, causing him
to bring into play almost the whole of his body. The one is the blow of
a boxer, the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the Hercules
of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not, as a rule, healthy.
They knock out their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die
of phthisis or dyspepsia.
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is
above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The
cultivation of any branch of science--of chemistry, of physics, of
geometry, of philology--may be a work of differentiated specialization,
and even so only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but
philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else
it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.
All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for the sake of
knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the
question. We learn something either for an immediate practical end, or
in order to complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the knowledge that
appears to us to be most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate
application to the non-intellectual necessities of life--answers to a
necessity which is no less real because it is intellectual, to a reason
of economy in thinking, to a principle of unity and continuity of
consciousness. But just as a scientific fact has its finality in the
rest of knowledge, so the philosophy that we would make our own has also
its extrinsic object--it refers to our whole destiny, to our attitude in
face of life and the universe. And the most tragic problem of philosophy
is to reconcile intellectual necessities with the necessities of the
heart and the will. For it is on this rock that every philosophy that
pretends to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction, the basis of
our existence, breaks to pieces. But do all men face this contradiction
squarely?
Little can be hoped from a ruler, for example, who has not at some time
or other been preoccupied, even if only confusedly, with the first
beginning and the ultimate end of all things, and above all of man, with
the "why" of his origin and the "wherefore" of his destiny.
And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must
involve the heart. It is not enough to think about our destiny: it must
be felt. And the would-be leader of men who affirms and proclaims that
he pays no heed to the things of the spirit, is not worthy to lead them.
By which I do not mean, of course, that any ready-made solution is to be
required of him. Solution? Is there indeed any?
So far as I am concerned, I will never willingly yield myself, nor
entrust my confidence, to any popular leader who is not penetrated with
the feeling that he who orders a people orders men, men of flesh and
bone, men who are born, suffer, and, although they do not wish to die,
die; men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who must be
themselves and not others; men, in fine, who seek that which we call
happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of
men to the generation which follows, without having any feeling for the
destiny of those who are sacrificed, without having any regard, not for
their memory, not for their names, but for them themselves.
All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in
the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only
those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be
persons of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess
great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as
regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have been
instances.
These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it
is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the
pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has had to be
amputated that it does not help him at all to think about it. And we all
lack something; only some of us feel the lack and others do not. Or they
pretend not to feel the lack, and then they are hypocrites.
A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him,
"Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?" And the sage answered
him, "Precisely for that reason--because it does not avail." It is
manifest that weeping avails something, even if only the alleviation of
distress; but the deep sense of Solon's reply to the impertinent
questioner is plainly seen. And I am convinced that we should solve many
things if we all went out into the streets and uncovered our griefs,
which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined
together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling
upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would
hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to
which men go to weep in common. A _miserere_ sung in common by a
multitude tormented by destiny has as much value as a philosophy. It is
not enough to cure the plague: we must learn to weep for it. Yes, we
must learn to weep! Perhaps that is the supreme wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.
There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the
tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life
itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated,
more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is
possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this
sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though
afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.
Sometimes it may originate in a chance illness--dyspepsia, for example;
but at other times it is constitutional. And it is useless to speak, as
we shall see, of men who are healthy and men who are not healthy. Apart
from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved
that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the
very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison
with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those
who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St.
Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René, Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi,
Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men burdened with
wisdom rather than with knowledge.
And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this tragic sense of life
also.
It is to this that we must now turn our attention, beginning with this
matter of health and disease.